Have you ever been audited by the IRS? I have. To put it as mildly as possible, it's not pleasant.
It was nearly 30 years ago, but I remember as though it happened last week. Being audited by the IRS is a long, stressful, worrisome, expensive process. My late husband was a small business owner; that's exactly who the newly weaponized IRS will be targeting with their legions of new auditors. They will scour tax returns for any error, no matter how small. When someone looks that hard, they find.
Back in the mid-1990s, there was a mistake in our tax return from three years earlier. Penalties and interest compounded daily, so we owed a massive amount by our modest financial standards. Pete and I worked with the IRS, answering every demand for receipts, documents, checks, and records. The litany of government demands seemed endless. Even though we were cooperating, the regularly recurring threatening letters invariably arrived on either a Friday or Saturday--just in time to wreck a hard-earned weekend.
We had life-threatening illness, several major surgeries, and even a terrible car accident in our family during the four-year ordeal of our audit. The IRS did not care. They wanted their money.
Thank God we had a good tax professional to help us through. He represented us to our assigned auditor and eventually arrived at a settlement that we could handle. I still have the letter from the IRS that closed our audit. But Pete's business folded during those years, and he never had one again. I'm convinced the anxiety, stress, and pressures of that miserable period took years off his life.
So now hardworking Americans will have 87,000 auditors poring over our paperwork, searching for government gold. I can promise you, they will find it. If there's anything itemized on your tax return, I advise you to hang on to every single receipt. You're going to need them.
